A hands-on, example-driven guide to developing Drupal websites that covers everything from site building, theme development, creating custom modules, as well as the development environment

Who This Book Is For

If you are a developer who wants to use Drupal to enhance your website project and web application to manage content, this book is for you. Whether you are new to Drupal or an experienced web developer, you will be able to master both basic configuration and advanced module development in Drupal through this book.

What You Will Learn

Set up your Drupal development environment

Brush up on your understanding of the concepts of object-oriented programming, module development, and test-driven development

Install and configure Drupal, add new content type, and work through lot of dummy content to create listing pages using views

Enhance the content author’s user experience and custom block

Find out about field Type API and explore custom theme development

Manage various media types in Drupal for your content-rich website

In Detail

Drupal is one of the most popular platforms with which to develop websites. With more and more organizations looking to build engaging digital experience for their stakeholders, the Drupal Content Management System offers a mobile-first platform with native support for integrations, better performance, and scalability. The new version brings significant changes to its module development and theme creation techniques, improving performance and refining the development experience.

This book will help you develop your own website using Drupal 8 in a step-by-step manner. You’ll start off by setting up your development environment, enabling you to begin writing custom code for a Drupal-powered website through PHPStorm. You will learn about configuration management and creating custom content types before exploring the HTML5 features included with Drupal 8.

You will then get familiar with Drupal 8’s mobile-first features, explore the built-in WYSIWYG and in-line editing capabilities of Drupal 8, and enhance the overall authoring experience. Later, you will create and enhance a Media Entity Lightbox module, before taking an in-depth look at the Views module.

We then cover some advanced search concepts and walk you through the installation and integration of the Java-based Apache Solr search engine. Finally, you will explore and configure the built-in support for REST and extend its support by installing the RESTful module. By the end of the book, you will have created a recipe sharing website while gaining a solid understanding of development best practices for Drupal 8.

Style and approach

Each chapter provides examples in a sequential manner from basic to advanced, and each example is explained using easy-to-understand language and a step-by-step approach. This programming experience will enable you to create a wide range of content authoring as well as end user experience.

Downloading the example code for this book. You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.PacktPub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.PacktPub.com/support and register to have the code file.